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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists (now on video)

Ignizio posted his review of the documentary CLEANFLIX,
an excellent nonfiction feature about the ironies of home-video movie
censorship in Mormon territory that actually made a balanced case for
LDS censors (it helps, of course, when the antagonists are powerful
corporate-studio swine, even with their movie-director minions
moaning about "artistic freedom"). Anyway, I had a review
of that in my archive FIRST, but just sort of figured CLEANFLIX
was a little too off-the-radar for you miserable Clevelanders, who
probably want to hear more about garbage like Dance Moms
(which I had to review also, BTW). I was going to pull CLEANFLIX
out of mothballs if the Cedar Lee or Cinematheque or somebody had the
good taste to premiere it on the big screen...but no. Ignizio tracked
down watched the movie himself and scooped me.

And he did so with a CLEANFLIX
review that said pretty much exactly what I thought too, making it
somehow an even worse offense. What, just because he owns this place
makes him act like he owns this place?

Well, I'm not letting him pull that
with WE ARE LEGION. I've got this smegging review, even though
I'd be amazed if anyone here is worthy of this docu outside of those
kewl programmers, DIY technophiles and hackers who put on NotaCon in
Cleveland every spring. Or underemployed, disgruntled nerds like me
who fantasize about unleashing Hell with a few keystrokes. So for the
NotaCon gang benefit (and a wish that they'd use their haqr smarts to
somehow get me a job somewhere; clear an employer's e-mail inbox of
every single resume but mine, something like that), I'm going to
review WE ARE LEGION right now. While Ignizio's probably still
off somewhere drunk with power.

Brian Kappenberger's feature shows how
21st-century computer hackers channeled their savvy and talents for
creative chaos into political protest, especially under a shadowy
umbrella organization called Anonymous that inspires fear and
outrageous law-enforcement backlash from time to time. And WE ARE
LEGION is a 21st-century story, no nostalgic recap of the
1980s-1990s "cyberpunk" era, the Well, Oscar Weiner
whistling "phone phreaks" getting free long distance, or
Matthew Broderick almost triggering a thermonuclear incident with a
lowly IBM XT in WARGAMES. I guess for the savvy viewer that
stuff is considered ancient history, which is fair.

Kappenberger shows that more
present-day uncensored website-forums such as 4chan.com and /b/
nurtured a large following of anything-goes anonymous posters,
initially doing nothing so bombshell as reviewing Japanese animation
or sharing porn files. Under the collective name "Anonymous"
- the default handle for posting on 4chan - they began banding
together for united action. First their target was a kind of wannabe
AM-radio talk-show type, a certain Hal Turner, who hosted a racist
podcast. The 4chan collective systematically harassed him and more or
less ruined his life. That taste of activism gave much of the
computer-chaos community a rush of righteousness. The others, who
preferred apolitical nihilism, came up with a nickname for the
do-gooders: "moral fags."

But the Church of Scientology presented
a target too big for the Anonymous community to ignore. The
Scientologists' infamous legal campaigns against dissidents trying to
expose church secrets riled the hackers. In February, 2008, to
humiliate and defy Scientology worldwide, Anonymous coordinated a
worldwide mass-protest outside the cults' various regional offices. A
great moment in the movie, this was actually the first widespread
appearance of the Guy Fawkes mask worn by Occupy Wall Street types,
an icon of Anonymous.

(See, you dumb filmmakers on Dianetics,
if only you'd created V FOR VENDETTA instead of BATTLEFIELD
EARTH, you'd have made a lot more friends with social-engineering
skills. Maybe even had one of your Sea Org guys up for the new Pope)

The media, especially Fox News, hyped
Anonymous and their brand of high-tech vigilante justice. The film
shows the hacker collective reacting en masse, variously to help
homegrown "Arab Spring" revolutionaries in Tunisia and
Egypt, then to cripple PayPal in a campaign to assist Julian Assange
during his Wikileaks-related persecution. High-tech attacks discussed
range from the site-smashing software weapon dubbed the "Low
Orbit Ion Cannon" to erasing an iPad by remote and having tons
of pizzas delivered to a victim's door.

Police raids, arrests and
security-force responses to Anonymous members may or may not seem
heavy-handed, depending on one's opinion of the `hacktivists';
clearly the filmmakers are on their side. One interviewee claims that
Anonymous wants a society in which the government fears the
citizenry, not the other way around. Which comes close, word-for-word
I believe, to what the Tea Party promotes, although the Tea Party
come up on the roll-call of folks likely to be on Anonymous' bad side
and are dismissed as religious-zealot gun-nuts.

This is very much an unfinished story,
with the main message being that young power users in the cyber
culture are not homebound slackers just playing World of Warcraft
or Second Life all the time. They watch and they care and they
act. When Anonymous threatens to bring the roof down, I listen,
and if you see WE ARE LEGION, you will too. Now, Anonymous can
aim that Low Orbit Ion Cannon away from the Cleveland Movie Blog . I
am sure Mr. Ignizio only sinned out of ignorance. (3 out of 4 stars).